1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is generally related to business processes, and more particularly to the modeling and execution of a business process within a collaboration environment.
2. Brief Description of Related Developments
The advent of the Internet has eased the global presentation and distribution of information. The Internet has been used for collaboration purposes for several years now. There are many software vendors that provide a collaboration environment over the web. But there is a lack of a framework to model and execute real-world business processes in existing collaboration environments over the web.
Traditional workflow modeling and execution is designed to integrate business processes across heterogeneous systems, by modeling and executing control flow across systems. Traditional workflows do not address modeling of business organization structure and data sharing and merging within the hierarchy, which typically occurs during the execution of a complex business process.
Commercial Collaboration system like eRoom™ (ER), Sitescape™ (SI), on Project™ (OP), Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server™ (MSP), IBM's Quickplace™ (IBMQ) provide a comprehensive collaboration framework including sharing of content (file content and limited support for database content) and interaction between project members. These traditional frameworks do not have proper support for collaboration during long duration projects involving relational database content.
Collaboration frameworks mentioned above also do not have proper support for modeling hierarchical project structures. Hierarchical project structures have to provide support for merging both relational and file/folder content across a hierarchy. WEBDAV (WDAV) based collaboration systems do provide support for hierarchical project structures. However, WEBDAV does not natively address the type of content being shared. So, any system built using this specification has to address the problem of support for collaboration on relational content. The non-WEBDAV based collaboration systems do not contain a framework to model hierarchical projects. Also, none of the above mentioned collaboration systems support business processes based on long-transaction frameworks.
Existing web collaboration frameworks do not have a proper framework support for specifying and executing any arbitrary business process. Also, their business process execution frameworks do not provide proper support for isolated business process execution environment, so that the changes to the resources during the business process execution are not exposed to the external world until the business process is terminated properly. They also lack fine-grained access control support on the resources being manipulated during a business process execution. These frameworks also do not support for creating savepoints and rolling back to savepoints (markers to which data in a long transaction can be rolled back to).
The existing web collaboration frameworks does not provide proper support for concurrent updates of the same resource in parallel steps of a business process and then an ability to merge the different views of the same resource from different parallel steps at synchronization time with conflict resolution.